Network servers and the accompanying local area networks (LANs) have expanded the power and increased the productivity of the work force. It was just a few years ago that every work station had a standalone personal computer incapable of communicating with any other computers in the office. Data had to be carried from person to person by diskette. Applications had to be purchased for each standalone personal computer at great expense. Capital intensive hardware such as printers were duplicated for each standalone personal computer. Security and backing up the data were immensely difficult without centralization.
Network servers and their LANs addressed many of these issues. Network servers allow for resource sharing such as sharing equipment, applications, data, and the means for handling data. Centralized backup and security were seen as definite advantages. Furthermore, networks offered new services such as electronic mail. However, it soon became clear that the network servers could have their disadvantages as well.
Centralization, hailed as a solution, developed its own problems. A predicament that might shut down a single standalone personal computer would, in a centralized network, shut down all the networked work stations. Small difficulties easily get magnified with centralization, as is the case with the failure of a network server interface card (NIC), a common dilemma. A NIC may be a card configured for Ethernet, LAN, or Token-Ring to name but a few. These cards fail occasionally requiring examination, repair, or even replacement. Unfortunately, the entire network has to be powered down in order to remove, replace or examine a NIC. Since it is not uncommon for modern network servers to have sixteen or more NICs, the frequency of the problem compounds along with the consequences. When the network server is down, none of the workstations in the office network system will be able to access the centralized data and centralized applications. Moreover, even if only the data or only the application is centralized, a work station will suffer decreased performance.
Frequent down times can be extremely expensive in many ways. When the network server is down, worker productivity comes to a stand still. There is no sharing of data, applications or equipment such as spread sheets, word processors, and printers. Bills cannot go out and orders cannot be entered. Sales and customer service representatives are unable to obtain product information or pull up invoices. Customers browsing or hoping to browse through a network server supported commercial web page are abruptly cut off or are unable to access the web pages. Such frustrations may manifest themselves in the permanent loss of customers, or at the least, in the lowering of consumer opinion with regard to a vendor, a vendor's product, or a vendor's service. Certainly, down time for a vendor's network server will reflect badly upon the vendor's reliability. Furthermore, the vendor will have to pay for more service calls. Rebooting a network server, after all, does require a certain amount of expertise. Overall, whenever the network server has to shut down, it costs the owner both time and money, and each server shut down may have ramifications far into the future. The magnitude of this problem is evidenced by the great cost that owners of network servers are willing to absorb in order to avoid down time through the purchase of uninterruptible power supplies, surge protects, and redundant hard drives.
What is needed to address these problems is an apparatus that can localize and isolate the problem module from the rest of the network server and allow for the removal and replacement of the problem module without powering down the network server.